“It’s the Economy Again, Stupid,” is the slogan Joe Biden is apparently using to try to convince voters who are more than sceptical. “Inflation,” as economists define the term, is almost meaningless to most voters because it doesn’t include food and energy prices, two significant parts of any household budget.
“It’s the Economy Again, Stupid,” appears to be the principle of the incumbent candidate, who hopes to convince voters of the strength of the economy when they are more than sceptical. The very word “bidenomics” combines two of the incumbent’s vulnerabilities: first, Joe Biden, at 81, is more like a “crypt keeper”; second, the economy is fine if you don’t look at it too closely. There is little that can be done about the first commitment, but the second opens the door for Donald Trump and his arguments about the real state of the economy.
The New York Times paints the most vivid picture of Biden’s economic world. Bidenomics propaganda points out that in 2020, the average wages of workers who still had jobs rose, not to mention those who were laid off, mostly service workers. But in reality, wage growth for everyone was restrained because those low-wage workers were rehired at their previous wages.
Bidenomics aficionado Paul Krugman went so far as to write in the British media, “There are two big questions about the US economy right now. One is why things are going so well. The other is why so many Americans insist it’s terrible.”
“Inflation,” as economists define the term, is almost irrelevant to most American voters because it doesn’t take into account rising food and energy prices, two significant parts of any household budget. To include those components in the lives of most voters requires a proper consumer price index with those parameters, but it rarely appears in Biden’s complacent stories about the economy.